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Buildings with Libraries: A Soft-Spoken Amenity

BOOK CLUB Residents gather in the library of Toren condominium in downtown Brooklyn, one of a growing number of buildings with an in-house library.Credit
Uli Seit for The New York Times

WHEN Martin Semjen first looked at the Stanton, a co-op at Broadway and 94th Street, he was delighted by the sauna and fitness room. His wife, Lynn Schnurnberger, on the other hand, fell hard for an unpretentious basement library that doubles as a meeting room and is lined on three sides with floor-to-ceiling wood bookcases. Residents can choose volumes on law and art, popular novels like “The Da Vinci Code” and “Atonement” and, fittingly enough, a biography of the building’s namesake, Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

“I really don’t use the fabulous gym equipment, but I do go and look at the old books,” said Ms. Schnurnberger, the co-author of, among other novels, the bestseller “Botox Diaries.” “The existence of the library spoke to the fact that this was more than a building. It was a community of people who still read.”

Granted, in New York residential buildings, barbells carry far more weight than books. “The gym is still one of the most important amenities, and after that are things like roof decks or other outdoor space,” said Tami Shaoul, a senior vice president of the Corcoran Group. “No client has ever told me ‘I must have a library.’ But when we go somewhere and do a tour of the amenities, their eyes do light up if they actually see one,” she added. “It makes them feel good about the building because they imagine themselves having that quiet space.”

In the highly competitive New York marketplace, where developers of residential buildings seem to be engaged in an amenities arms race — cold storage, wine cellar, gym, pool, hot tub, children’s playroom, ’tween playroom, party room — the library is a low-cost frill. “You don’t need a lot of space to create a small reading room. It can be carved out of the lobby,” said Kathy Braddock, an owner of Rutenberg Realty.

The library “may be a marker of luxury. It’s like having that fourth kid,” said Roy Kim, a senior vice president of design at Extell, whose condo project One57 on West 57th Street, scheduled to open in late 2013, will have a library. So will the Touraine, an Upper East Side condo by Toll Brothers opening earlier that year.

“It’s an experiment on our end,” said David von Spreckelsen, a division president of Toll Brothers. “The demographic at the Touraine is a little older — some empty nesters or couples with a pied-à-terre. They’re not people who are working 9 to 9. Weekends and nights, they’ll come home and may have time to go to the library to read and have a glass of wine by the fire. We’ll see how it goes.”

On the most practical level, a library in a New York building is the equivalent of a bonus room in a sprawling suburban house. At the Battery Park City condominium 1 Rector Park “the residences are not large,” said James Lansill, a senior managing director of Corcoran Sunshine, the sales and marketing agents for the building. Consequently, its library, known as Bar and Books, can be a retreat “while the housekeeper is vacuuming, or to get away from the nanny and the children,” he said. The lounge chairs and mohair sofas have helped turn the space into a second living room for some owners.

As Ms. Braddock puts it, “a library increases the square footage of your own apartment because it gives an extra quiet place in the building you can get away to. That’s a big deal in New York. Whether residents read the books on the shelves is irrelevant.”

About those books. The developer generally seeds the collection, but often it grows in an organic fashion as residents cull their own shelves. Such was the case at Manhattan House on East 66th Street, where coffee table tomes on design got the ball rolling. Similarly themed titles have made their way from personal collections to the rooftop library, a building spokesman said.

At 1 Rector Park, volumes on art, architecture, travel and fashion were the first arrivals, Mr. Lansill said. “Now that people have moved in and regularly used the library,” he said, “the collection has slowly grown. Residents are especially comfortable borrowing children’s books and adding their own. Our most shared titles, without a doubt, come from the Harry Potter series.”

At the Caledonia, a condo on West 17th Street, the library is called the Assouline Culture Lounge, a nod to its cache of design, fashion and photography books from Assouline, the high-end publishing company. The library, which has club chairs and a fireplace, “is an invitation to culture,” said Daria Salusbury, a senior vice president of Related Companies, the building’s developer.

There, culture seems to be narrowly defined; Assouline’s are the only books on the shelves. In any case, beach-book castoffs are not encouraged. “I don’t want to have 17 versions of Agatha Christie paperbacks,” Ms. Salusbury said firmly. “That’s not the purpose of this. The purpose is to give a very sophisticated perspective on culture.” And, she added, “It’s been received very nicely.”

So nicely that the idea has been extended to another Related property, Tribeca Tower, a rental building on Duane Street. A slice of the lobby has been carved into a “gathering space” with selections from the Assouline list. According to Joanna Rose, a spokeswoman for Related, the developer picked up the tab for the books, viewing the relationship with the publisher as “a branding opportunity.”

Assouline also supplied the books for the library at New York by Gehry, the highly publicized rental in the financial district. The seventh-floor room with leather sofas and accent chairs is a hit, according to Clifford Finn, the president of new development marketing for Citi Habitats, leasing agents for the building.

“I’ve never been in the library when I haven’t seen people sitting in chairs reading,” said Mr. Finn, who like Ms. Salusbury does not welcome unsolicited additions to the shelves: “It’s not really in keeping with the feel of the room.

“A lot of the books in our collection are very expensive,” he continued. “It’s nice that residents have access to them. Sometimes they borrow them, but they return them. I can’t say we never have a book that doesn’t come back, but it’s an uncommon occurrence.”

No librarians or other authority figures patrol the bookshelves in any of these buildings. There is no mechanism for checking out books — they are borrowed at will with no penalties for those who take their sweet time reading them. Guilt and good manners keep the collections intact.

As part of a two-year sponsorship, Lincoln Center provided an extensive list of performing arts-themed books for the Avery condominium, its neighbor on Riverside Boulevard. Titles like “101 Stories of the Great Ballets,” The Columbia Encyclopedia of Modern Drama, “Celluloid Power” and three dozen others were duly purchased, said a spokeswoman for Extell, the condominium’s developer. A spokeswoman for Lincoln Center declined to discuss its arrangement with Extell.

The library shelves at Toren, a new condo in Brooklyn, were populated with the help of the Strand bookstore in Greenwich Village, according to the building’s sales manager, Marco Auteri. “We requested a variety of books based on quality and content,” he said. “We wanted to create a real library and to have a wide variety of genres.”

Thus, browsers can find among the 500-plus volumes everything from “Ulysses” to test prep guides. “Since residents began contributing to the library,” Mr. Auteri added, “they’ve increased the contents by 50 percent. And now, in addition to books, we also have DVDs and games.”

In older buildings, things are considerably more casual; the collections are crowd-sourced from the start. At the Ardsley on Central Park West, a few shelves in the combination community room/playroom constitute the library — a mix of fiction (“The Fountainhead”), poetry (“The Iliad”) and nonfiction donated and alphabetized by residents.

Meanwhile, the collection at 924 West End Avenue — housed, as in many buildings, on several open shelves in the laundry room, includes “The World According to Garp” and “Ragtime.”

“Some people will come down and do their wash and while they’re waiting read one of the books,” said Raymond Hoey, the president of the building’s co-op board.

In a few buildings, like the Knickerbocker on East 72nd Street and 170 East End Avenue, the in-house libraries serve up more than biographies and bestsellers; they serve breakfast. “People will come down and read while they have bagels and pastries,” said Burt Wallack, the managing agent for the Knickerbocker which hires an outside service to do the catering. “A lot of residents know their neighbors because of the library.”

Orin Wilf, the president of Skyline, the developer of 170 East End Avenue, compared the building’s library to a town square. Residents have cocktail parties and birthday parties there, said Mr. Wilf, who lives in the building. He and his neighbors donate the books that make up the library’s collection; the concierge monitors the offerings to make sure they are suitable.

“We leave it to her discretion,” Mr. Wilf said. The collection is heavy on finance, history and parental advice because, he said, “we’re a family-friendly building.

“I’m a big James Patterson fan and I usually leave his books in the library when I finish them,” he continued. “And sometimes someone will beat me to the punch. I’ll go down there and actually find a Patterson I haven’t already read.”